Comments

On this topic, you recently tweeted: “5 years ago, Adobe had yet to own Flash.”

Terrible grammar aside, this is a salient point.

[Please illuminate me on the terribleness of my grammar. Clearly I are too dumm to get it on my own. –J.]

These were known as the last of the good old days of Adobe. Everything went downhill with the acquisition of Macromedia and Flash.

[I disagree. We’ve been able to do a lot of integrating (e.g. pulling PSDs into Flash) that saves people a huge amount of time. And I promise you, people complained like crazy pre-Macromedia, too. The difference is that they didn’t feel a need to do it out of fealty to Steve Jobs. Believe me, there are a million things I’d like to change about Adobe & its products, but in no way does that mean I regret the Adobe-Macromedia marriage or blame it for whatever is wrong with products X, Y, and Z. –J.]

How you recover from that fall will be interesting. It’s certainly not going to be easy, and it’s not guaranteed that you will rise from it.

Fealty to Steve Jobs? You really have lost your mind. Where did I mention Steve Jobs in my post? Is this your way of compensating – pretending that any criticism must be due to some cult of Steve Jobs worshippers?

Truly sad. It might be nice if you could open your eyes and stop deluding yourself. I fear that this is highly indicative of the mental rot that will bring Adobe down.

Before the Macromedia acquisition, I did not really like Adobe, they were a very closed company, whereas with Macromedia you could actually talk to product engineers and even to top management people (e.g. senior VP). I don’t recall Adobe doing point-releases in the past (I could be wrong) or having public beta programs or a Lab.

After the acquisition, we actually have people like John Nack talking about their products. I was able to improve my chess game (http://www.sparkchess.com) by discussing with flash player engineers and I could actively contribute to products like Lightroom, AIR and the Lens Profiler before they were released.

For me, to be able to talk to a product engineer, to be able to file a bug report and see it fixed, is actually very important and gives me confidence.

Chris Cox — 11:18 AM on November 07, 2010

> I don’t recall Adobe doing point-releases in the past (I could be wrong) or having public beta programs or a Lab.

Yeah, pretty much wrong on every single point.
(especially since I spent a lot of time getting Photoshop dots for 4.0.1 to 4.0.8 out the door, and spend a lot of my personal time answering questions in several forums)

On the grammar, I’m reasonably certain ‘had yet’ is fine, but ‘had yet to’ feels a bit awkward, it feels like an old way of saying something, or too formal. It could be that it’s just not a common phrase we see a lot and so it seems odd when we read it. I might have written “5 years ago, Adobe didn’t own Flash.” Or perhaps “Adobe acquired Flash five years ago.” But neither of those convey exactly what you meant, that something that was going to happen hadn’t happened ‘yet’, and that the thing in the past had an impact on the present. My congratulations on your successful use of the present perfect tense :)

scott graham — 6:11 PM on November 07, 2010

It is nice to be reminded that Confucius is not all bad, because every day here in Beijing I experience how his philosophy, namely “know your place”(don’t question, etc), has screwed up this country for 1000’s of years.